Week 84

Corona Round 2 Week 6

February 18, 2014

Well first off, Elder Wood who took this photograph is fired lol. Cerila isn't even looking. <facepalm> haha

So Juan and his mom, Cerila, got baptized this Sunday!
I don't remember how much I've said about Juan so far so I'll just tell the whole story.
Three months ago Elder Wilkinson and I were doubled into the area. We looked through the old records in the area book and found a record for Juan. So we swung by. Juan wasn't home but his mom was. However, Cerila only speaks Spanish. So she and I had a VERY broken conversation in spanglish where she said she was interested in having the Spanish missionaries over. However Juan worked weird hours so it was going to be hard to reach him. We sent the referral to the spanish elders, and they never went...

Sometime a few weeks later we were on the same street visiting people when an old mexican guy sitting in his garage told us to come back and have some food in an hour. They were having a barbeque. So we swung by an hour later and walked up to the door and a lady came out waving her arms and yelling "no, no, he's not here. Leave." So we dejectedly walked back to our bikes and rolled down the street where we saw Juan walking his mom out to his car. We said hi, and asked him if he was serious about the gospel. He said he was and my companion said "will you get baptized on February 16th? (This was early January sometime). To our surprise Juan said yes.

It took another week or so to get back in with him. I have already written about swapping the JW stuff for mormon stuff. But the teaching process was pretty simple, he had already gone through the lessons, and he was super willing to learn and live the things we were teaching. His mom said that she wanted to learn too. We were surprised that the spanish missionaries hadn't come by since we had already asked them too. So we called them up and said "what are you doing right now?" and had them go  over and see Cerila.

She wanted to get baptized too. However, they both needed to go to church. Juan's problem before was that he worked on sunday so he couldn't get baptized. (Another funny thing about Juan is that half the time we were on exchanges or splits when we were teaching him so I wasn't there very much.) But my companion went over there on exchanges and had a very solid lesson, and so Juan called in and said that he couldn't work that sunday. And they went to the Spanish ward. The following week we asked what he was going to do about the next sunday and he said that his boss had talked to him and said that he could work the night shift on sunday so he could do stuff during the day. So he was able to permanently come to church.

A big answer for him came when seven unboxed/unwrapped spanish Book of mormons showed up in front of him on the conveyor belt at Fedex where he works. I think I've already written something about that.

He's been coming and doing well, with relatively little effort on our part. He was going to get baptized the week before last but he and his mom were visiting his brother in jail and got home too late to make it.

The baptism went well. It was all in Spanish, so I caught one out of every 10 words or so (bautismo, espirito santo, padre celestial etc.) The only thing of note was that Cerila had to be dunked four times! Since she is so small and old the Spanish Elder Baptizing her decided (inexplicably) to lower the water so she would be sitting on the ground and baptize her with my companion's help (he baptized Juan). But her knees and toes kept poking up. So it took 4 times for them to get it right.

It was cool though to see how fast the process went. Also, Juan's original baptism date (on the old teaching record) was for february 17 2013. So he was baptized a year after his original date. The lord had been preparing him the whole time. While I am a little bummed that we had to send them over to the spanish ward, I am glad of the role we were able to play in their conversion.

Our Investigator Arianna is doing great as well. If she lived here in So Cal she could be baptized this weekend. However she will be returning to Rhode Island in a couple weeks where she lives with her boyfriend. She is willing to move out and perhaps join the church out there (at least continue investigating) but she wants to have a face-to-face conversation with her boyfriend about her decisions. So that's bittersweet.

We are still working with Nicole and Azod. They are basically mormon already in their beliefs but just need to get a few key things down. (Joseph Smith, Book of Mormon. You know, the simple stuff... haha). Our other active investigators are Frank and his son Mark.

It's funny to think that you guys had so much snow and rain. It's still in the mid 70s and sunny here.

Love,
Elder Bryce Johns